This is my voice—
the one you didn’t want to hear. The one you said tore holes in your calm, wounded your ego (you called it your heart), and echoed too close to your truth. I am the voice you silenced while pretending to listen, the one that whispered wake up while you slept soundly in the illusion you built for yourself.
You said you were ready for this thing—life. You said you wanted real. But when real came wrapped in shadow and honesty, you looked away. I hid nothing from you. Everything you needed to know was there, painted across my eyes, stitched into my laughter, written in the pauses between words. You never asked the right questions, and so the answers remained behind locked doors, waiting, patient, ancient.
You thought I needed saving. You mistook my softness for helplessness, my silence for surrender. You forgot I learned to run before you could walk, that I had me long before you had you. I was never lost, never the damsel tangled in your story’s thorns. I was the firelight inside the tower. I was the spell on the wind. The healer with hands that mended worlds before you ever called my name.
From you, I pulled my energy—the protection you sought in my presence, the safety you mistook for control. I gave, and you mistook it for yours to keep. You stayed behind with the things you refused to change, clutching the pieces that felt familiar even as they rotted. You loved being right more than you loved being free.
You never noticed that I never spoke of the past, not really. When I did, it was never for pity or nostalgia. It was for the lesson—the echo of what we were meant to learn but didn’t. I live in the now, in the breath that follows the storm. You stayed in the ruins, rearranging ashes and calling them home.
Now, when the staff strikes the ground—
one, two, three—
the ripple moves outward. It finds you where you hid, brings back to my feet the things that were stolen. Through the looking glass, I see you—fractured by your own reflection, haunted by the choices you keep pretending you didn’t make.
And me?
In the dark, when the lights go down, when your thoughts crawl out from their cages and whisper my name—
I sleep soundly.
In the bed I made.
Alone, but unbroken.
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